beingthechef's Page

Do you pick your sales rep? If you’re like most people, you just take whichever salesman walks through the door when your looking for a vendor. Seems OK, right? Well, let me ask you this, would you place a help wanted ad in the paper and then just hire who ever walked in your door from the ad? Of course you wouldn't!



Your sales rep makes his living off commissions from your purchases, so in essence, he works for you and you should pick a rep just as you would an… Continue

Lower your food cost today, without changing how you do anything and maybe even put some of that savings in your bank account! [pause for cheesy Infomercial Music]

We work in a world of percentages: Food Cost Percentage, Labor Cost Percentage, Profit Percentage. The list goes on and on and we face tremendous pressure and often depend on achieving our percentage goals so that we can make our bonuses or even keep our jobs.

There are hundreds of…

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This morning, for some reason I noticed the trash can in our employee locker room. Nothing special about this trash can, but I realized that I had never myself taken it out, nor had I ever asked anyone else to take care of it, but it has always been taken care of ever since we opened this building. I know what you’re thinking, “Whooptee do! Some one took out the trash.”. It may seem like a small thing, and indeed it is, but the important part is that I didn’t have to ask and I’ve never had to… Continue

Two Hundred guests had come to dinner that night for a prime rib dinner that was now way over cooked. I was a sous chef at this time in my life and still had quite a bit to learn about management. Being young, arrogant and driven, I “knew” I was ready to be the chef of my own property, so this was a pretty big blow to my esteem. The previous week, our dishwasher had been cleaning the alto-sham and must of turned the temperature dial up when he was wiping the front of the… Continue

Sometimes you just know that you blew it. It’s funny that even if you know the right answers, you can still take the wrong actions. By reacting to poor advice from a manager, I almost killed the motivation of one of my strongest employees.



Here is how the scenario unfolded: In an impromptu meeting with one of our fellow managers, I was told how a particular employee seemed to have too much down time when I was off property and was playing around too much. Most… Continue